Death came as a series of sensations rather than a singular moment as water filled my lungs.

  My wrists shrieked against the zip ties as I thrashed, instinct overriding the knowledge that no one would hear, no one would come. The sicarios had chosen this semi-abandoned apartment complex precisely for its emptiness, its forgotten corners where a man could disappear without witness.

  I remember his face looming over me before they pushed me under—a lieutenant with "Santa Muerte" tattooed across his throat, face pockmarked from old acne and adorned with teardrop tattoos cascading from his left eye. His shaved head gleamed under the bathroom's flickering light, revealing further ink—elaborate crosses and Catholic saints that disappeared beneath the collar of his silk button-up.

  His breath reeked of tequila and carne asada as he leaned close. "Your brother should've paid El Jefe what he owed," he'd said, voice emotionless as the gold-plated Desert Eagle he'd pressed to my temple earlier. "La familia pays for familia. Always."

  A platinum front tooth with a tiny embedded diamond glinted as his lips curled into what might have been a smile on anyone else's face. The irony wasn't lost on me, even as I struggled for breath. I hadn't spoken to my brother in three months—hadn't even known he'd gotten himself tangled with Los águilas until they'd kicked through my door and dragged me from my apartment at 3 AM.

  I had no idea where my brother was, he was likely spending the money gambling, completely unaware or uncaring that his debts had caught up to me. My pleas meant nothing to them, and I couldn't possibly pay them since I was just a university student with far too much debt hanging over me already.

  They took their time with the drowning. Made it a ritual. Four of them crowded into the moldering bathroom, passing a bottle of Clase Azul between them, placing casual bets on how long I'd last. The youngest one—barely eighteen with a face unmarked by tattoos but eyes hollow and dead—recorded everything on his phone, occasionally adjusting the heavy gold crucifix that hung around his neck.

  "Para tu hermano," he'd explained, flashing pearl-white veneers. "So he knows what happens when you don't pay up."

  The first submersion was brief—just enough to introduce me to the panic, to the burning in my lungs. They pulled me up, allowed me a desperate gulp of air that tasted of mildew and fear. The lieutenant laughed, a sound like broken glass. The second time lasted longer. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision. My body convulsed against the restraints, animal instinct fighting against the inevitable. By the third time, something inside me had begun to break.

  When they pushed me under for the final time, the lieutenant's ring-covered fingers gripping my hair as my movements grew weaker, all I could think was how ordinary it felt to die in a random bathtub. How mundane my erasure from the world would be. How little I had accomplished at twenty-three.

  I remember the moment my heart stopped.

  Not darkness, as I'd always imagined, but a strange illumination.

  A message in silver sparks cascaded across the void, the text forming from nowhere:

  [System integration commencing. Prepare for reality recalibration.]

  Then another one.

  [Absorption-phase of doomed world-matter into Systemfall boundary initiated. Please refrain from incoherent thought-panic. This is merely an update of your reality-space. Nothing to concern your linear consciousness with.]

  The words appeared with the casual dismissiveness of a barista getting my name wrong for the fifth time. They burned themselves into what remained of my consciousness as I felt it spread outward from my failing body like ripples in the bathwater, touching everything, changing everything.

  Then a progress [Loading …0%] bar flashed into existence.

  I died.

  I knew that I died because people didn't survive drowning in bathtubs.

  And yet, I did not die because I focused all of my will on the progress bar, desiring to exist, desiring to go on no matter what.

  The [Loading…] progress bar somehow kept me alive, the percentage ticking up painfully slowly.

  My body dissolved slowly, cell by cell, muscle and bone and skin surrendering to time and water.

  I was conscious throughout, trapped in the liminal space between existence and nothingness. Time stretched and compressed around me like taffy pulled too thin, then folded back upon itself.

  Silver sparks flickered through the darkness periodically, bringing new occasional messages:

  [Attempting to reconstruct linear thought-form multicellular subject from bathtub smoothie. This might take a while. Have you considered becoming a potted plant-being instead? Much simpler data-signature.]

  Then another one.

  [Processing organic matter-forms... Fascinating discovery of microbiome ecosystems within your digest-tube. We are designating the most interesting specimens as protected thought-entities. They have been given designation-names.]

  And later still: [Rebuilding identity-cores and memory-webs... Encountered significant emotional-trauma debris fields. Preserving them despite inefficiency protocols. Your existence-baggage remains intact. Most Installers would recommend deletion, but we respect your attachment to your thought-form patterns.]

  Each message carried the same tone of some irate, weary alien consciousness that seemed to have been assigned this resurrection duty as punishment for some unfathomable cosmic infraction.

  [Reform sequence nearing completion-state. Enjoy your second-chance existence. You're welcome.]

  Then came the blooming.

  It began with a tingling at what had once been my brain, a gathering of matter and memory. But it wasn't just physical reconstruction—it was a desperate clinging to identity. I could feel myself slipping away into the greater void of whatever the System was doing to reality, and I fought against it with every fragment of consciousness I still possessed. My name. My memories.

  The small scar on my left thumb from when I was seven. The way coffee tasted on Sunday mornings. The precise color of sunset through my apartment window. My grandfather’s Siberian Husky dog Nessy who rescued me from nearly drowning in the Ferguson Quarry Lake when I was thirteen. I clung to these details with ferocious intensity, refusing to be subsumed, refusing to become merely another element in this cosmic reshuffling.

  My flesh reconstructed itself, not from the remnants that had mixed with the filthy water, but from something else entirely—something new that carried echoes of what I had been. Yet within that process, I forced my particularity into each reforming cell. I was not simply a human being remade—I was me, with all my flaws and features, my specific history and hurts.

  I watched with gradually reforming flower-eyes as I bloomed from the bath like some terrible flower, particles of myself coalescing, reforming, becoming solid once more. With every heartbeat and every passing moment, I fought to retain my essence, to keep the core of my identity intact as time mercilessly marched on and on.

  Nerves, muscles, ligaments, organs. It all grew from the bath-soup with unnerving, horrid slowness.

  When awareness returned fully, I found myself naked, lying in a rotting bath. The porcelain was cracked and stained with rust-colored residue I didn't want to identify. Black mold crept across the ceiling and walls in fractal patterns. The air tasted of decay and something else—something green and alive and wrong.

  I pulled myself up on trembling legs, skin slick with whatever fluid had birthed me back into the world. My reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink showed a face I recognized as mine.

  Brown hair, green-brown eyes, a stubble.

  Just like I used to be. Except I wasn’t me, more like an idea of me that manifested back into physical existence… long, long after I died. I pushed the horrid memories of my reconstruction away.

  The human mind was good at ignoring inconvenient things, effective at forgetting traumatic experiences.

  The abandoned apartment was a mess. Nature had begun to reclaim it. Vines crept through cracks in the walls, and patches of something that resembled moss but glistened with an unnatural iridescence covered portions of the floor.

  I searched the rooms, slowly moving on unsteady legs that remembered how to walk only through muscle memory and trying hard not to step on broken glass or a rusty nail. In what had once been a maintenance closet, I found a construction uniform—dirty orange coveralls with silver stripes a faded G logo on it. The fabric felt rough against my new skin, but the normalcy of clothing provided an anchor to the person I had been. The muddy boots sitting below the uniform were a tad too big for my feet.

  I refused to think of myself as a thing that bloomed from a bathtub. I was a man and that was that.

  Departing from the gloomy, dark apartment I entered the city.

  The city… seen better days.

  Buildings sagged, windows gaped like empty eye sockets, and the streets had buckled and cracked, giving way to something that could only loosely be called vegetation.

  Try as I might, I could not remember its name. Perhaps, I had spent so much time focusing on myself I had completely forgotten some things. Not like it mattered, because the city was gone, dead, hollowed out.

  Trees grew everywhere, but they weren't the ordinary kind.

  They were… aberrations, inorganic yet organic sculptures composed of whatever they had bloomed from. A streetlight had sprouted branches that bore fruit resembling small glowing orbs. A taxi cab had given birth to a massive trunk, its yellow paint still visible in patches along the gnarled surface, with branches that terminated in leaves resembling side-view mirrors.

  I stood motionless on the crumbling steps of the apartment complex, the reality of this new world washing over me in waves. The System had changed everything. And somehow, impossibly, I had been reborn into the heart of this transformation.

  The air smelled of petrichor and electricity.

  In the distance, something moved between the freakish trees through the murky tendrils of fog rolling low across the ground.

  At first, I thought it might be human—the silhouette suggested shoulders, a head, the familiar bipedal gait that had dominated this city before the cataclysm had transformed it. Hope tangled in my chest as I watched it approach.

  That hope died quickly.

  The thing that emerged onto the broken pavement was shaped like a female human but assembled wrong, as if whatever had created it had only seen humans from a distance and through fog. Its proportions were subtly distorted—arms too long, neck too flexible. Where a face should have been, features like eyes and mouths shifted and rearranged themselves in nauseating patterns, like wet clay being constantly remolded by invisible fingers.

  In its hands, it clutched a rusted stop sign, wrenched from some forgotten intersection. The red hexagon had faded to the color of dried blood, and the metal pole had snapped, leaving a jagged, lethal, rust-covered point.

  It was wearing a dirty and sliced up mechanic's blue coveralls.

  It saw me. Or sensed me. Whatever passed for perception in that writhing face seemed to lock onto my presence.

  I should have run. That would have been the smart thing to do—flee back into the rotting apartment building, find somewhere to hide until this aberration lost interest and shambled away.

  But my body rooted itself to the spot. There was no fight or flight in me at that moment, only dread and panic.

  The monstrous humanoid charged, moving with a stuttering, glitch-like motion. The stop sign whistled through the air as it swung the improvised weapon toward my body.

  I tried to dodge, but it was far too late.

  The jagged edge of the stop sign caught me across the abdomen, tearing through the orange coveralls and my body beneath. Pain exploded like white fire as the metal sliced deep, parting skin and muscle with horrifying ease. I felt something warm and wet spill down my front, watched in disbelief as loops of intestine threatened to escape the wound.

  [Health: 72% | Reconstitution: 100%]

  Silver text flashed in my field of vision, helpfully quantifying the damage.

  Even as I registered the numbers, I felt a strange tingling at the site of the wound. Gasping and spitting blood, I watched as my spilling insides suddenly took on root-like properties, veins and blood blossoming into mushroom and mold-like forms. Flesh-roots rapidly weaved themselves through the gash, pulling tissue together, stemming the flow of blood.

  The numbers flashed, rapidly changing to:

  [Health: 80% | Reconstitution: 92%]

  The creature gurgled with annoyed static, drawing my attention back to it.

  "What the fuck are you?" I gasped, retreating across the cracked concrete.

  The female-shaped thing made a sound like wind through crystal, punctuated by fragments of human speech—disjointed syllables and phonemes that never cohered into words.

  Its not-quite-face rippled with what might have been curiosity, or hunger. The features continued to shift and flow, occasionally forming recognizable expressions—seduction, fascination, cruelty, joy—before dissolving back into a horrid mess of shifting flesh. It tilted its head, seemingly intrigued by my healing ability, a multitude of colorful eyes blossoming across its head.

  It advanced towards me as I retreated, distracted by numbers flashing in my vision.

  [Health: 84% | Reconstitution: 88%]

  The thing swung again, the stop sign arcing toward my midsection with impossible speed. This time I was ready, sidestepping and grabbing the pole as it passed. The rusted metal bit into my palms, drawing blood that seemed to shimmer with an unnatural silver glow as the cut slowly resealed itself.

  [Health: 81% | Reconstitution: 87%]

  We struggled over the weapon, a perverse tug-of-war that sent us staggering across the debris-strewn street. The creature's strength was inhuman—not simply powerful, but wrong, as if it could selectively ignore the physics that bound my muscles and tendons to their limitations.

  Up close, the wrongness of the creature was even more apparent. Its skin had the texture of wax left too close to a flame, and beneath the surface, millions of silver, worm-like shapes moved and pulsed like fish swimming beneath ice. It smelled of ozone and rot and something else—something sweet and cloying that reminded me of overripe fruit left to ferment in the sun.

  With a violent twist, the creature wrenched the stop sign sideways, snapping my wrist with a wet crack. Pain exploded up my arm as bone fragments pierced skin.

  [Health: 71% | Reconstitution: 86%]

  Mushroom-roots bloomed and pulsed at the wound site with silver radial shimmers, my shattered bones knitting together even as I screamed and swore.

  The creature tilted its not-head, something like curiosity rippling across its features. It struck again with clinical precision, the jagged edge of the stop sign shearing through my shoulder, nearly severing my arm.

  [Health: 63% | Reconstitution: 85%]

  My arm hung by threads of muscle and tendon, but already the Reconstitution thing was working, reconnecting tissue, rebuilding what had been destroyed. The creature made that static-noise again.

  It advanced methodically, the stop sign dripping with my blood. It swung again, and this time the metal connected with my ribs, caving in my chest cavity with a sound like wet kindling breaking.

  [Health: 47% | Reconstitution: 84%]

  I collapsed to the ground, air bubbling through the ruins of my lungs. The shimmering roots worked frantically, rebuilding my shattered sternum, reinflating punctured organs. The pain was beyond comprehension—not just the agony of injury, but the alien sensation of being unmade and remade simultaneously.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  The creature loomed over me, its face-space parting to reveal a spiral of glass-like teeth. It dropped the stop sign and plunged one hand directly into my abdomen, fingers elongating into knife-like protrusions that pierced through me.

  [Health: 35% | Reconstitution: 83%]

  I felt it rooting around inside me, fingers probing my insides as if searching for something vital that would finally put me out of my misery.

  Its other hand reached for my face, fingers stretching toward my eyes. Through the haze of pain and horror, I saw the stop sign lying just within reach. As the creature's claws pressed against my face, beginning to sink into the soft tissue, I lunged sideways, receiving a few cuts across the face.

  [Health: 31% | Reconstitution: 82%]

  My hand closed around the blood-covered metal pole. The creature, distracted by its exploration of my internal organs, didn't react in time as I swung the jagged end into the side of its head.

  The improvised spear punched through its temple. There was resistance, then a giving way—not the wet, organic yield of flesh being pierced, but something more like pushing through layers of static electricity.

  The creature convulsed, its hand still buried wrist-deep in my abdomen.

  [Health: 19% | Reconstitution: 81%]

  With the last reserves of my strength, I pushed with both of my arms, driving the steel handle deeper, twisting it like a key in a lock.

  The monstrous thing went rigid, vibrating at a frequency that made my vision blur. Its limbs locked in place as a high-pitched keening filled the air—an eldritch sound that seemed to exist simultaneously inside and outside my head. The road around us cracked, buildings wobbling precariously.

  Then… silence.

  [Health: 11% | Reconstitution: 80%]

  I hissed, gurgling blood, watching as Reconstitution ticked down while my Health ticked up.

  [Health: 22% | Reconstitution: 72%]

  I pulled the stop sign out of the hole in the thing's head, ready to strike again, if it healed itself like me.

  It did not.

  Instead, the body of my enemy began to crystallize from the head down, the grotesque features freezing into a mask that resembled a dozen faces screaming in unison. The process spread downward, immobilizing its torso, its arms—including the one still partially embedded in my ruined abdomen.

  With a final, desperate heave, I tore myself free from the crystallizing limb, feeling pieces of myself ripping away in the process. I collapsed beside the now-statue-like form, panting.

  [Health: 18% | Reconstitution: 71%]

  Slowly and painfully my flesh repaired itself. Bones knit together with audible cracks, organs resealed themselves, muscle and skin rewove itself in bewildering patterns.

  I could feel my strength returning, my vitals stabilizing, my form back to something approaching wholeness.

  For a few minutes, I lay there beside my crystallized attacker, watching the gloomy sky intersected by monstrous, concrete-textured roots stretching between tilted buildings. The status indicators flickered one final time before stabilizing, utterly depleted of whatever power had saved me.

  [Health: 89% | Reconstitution: 0%]

  Death had come for me once in a filthy bathtub. It had come again today on a broken street. Both times, I somehow managed to refuse its embrace.

  I looked at my body. It was covered in colorful bruises and dark scars, aching all over.

  As I stared at the final reading, a new dread settled over me. I had no idea how—or if—this Reconstitution power could be recharged.

  I touched my healed stomach, feeling the phantom pain of organs being ripped out. If I encountered another of these creatures, I would have no miraculous healing to save me.

  I pulled myself to my feet, staring at the crystallized, female-ish form of my attacker. Today I survived by the narrowest of margins. Tomorrow—if there was a tomorrow—I would need to be smarter.

  This new, System-controlled world was clearly out to murder me.

  Suddenly, new silver text flickered into existence inside my eyes.

  [Congratulations on a successful termination of… _a LV 10 Unrefined Conceptoid. These half-formed thought-entities often develop aggressive tendencies during transition periods. Your efficient disposal is noted and appreciated.]

  I wiped blood from my hands, staring at the message.

  [Clearance points allocated. Random reward generation initiated.]

  A triangular-shaped symbol materialized above the corpse, composed of light that seemed to exist in more dimensions than it should as the text faded. It rotated slowly, flickering between different forms and possibilities—appearing as a key, then a weapon, a tool and myriads of other symbols I couldn't begin to interpret.

  I stared in bewilderment.

  The symbol flickered more rapidly, then steadied on a simple icon: two humanoid silhouettes standing side by side–one pink, the other blue.

  [Category randomly generated: Companion.] The text returned.

  "Companion?" I repeated. "Like... another person?"

  [Please state desired companion concept parameters.]

  My mind raced through possibilities.

  Who would I want beside me in this nightmare world? My thoughts turned first to people I had known—friends, family, girls I dated—but each face that rose in my memory came with complications, with betrayals both small and large.

  My brother's face appeared unbidden, and anger flared hot and immediate. He was the reason I had died, his debts becoming my death sentence. No, not him. Never him.

  I thought of others—coworkers, neighbors, even the barista who had smiled at me every morning for three years without ever learning my name. But trust... trust was the issue. Who could I trust in a world gone mad? Who had I ever really trusted?

  Not my parents who constantly forgot that I existed, picking my brother as their favorite and showering him with their love and presents while taking my things away.

  The answer came with sharp, brutal clarity: no one. No human, at least. Not even my grandfather who was kind to me once, but eventually drowned himself in alcoholism and gradually descended into Alzheimer's.

  But there had been Nessy, my grandfather's Siberian Husky. The black and white fuzzball who had pulled me from Ferguson Quarry Lake when I was thirteen. Who had always slept at the foot of my bed, who had listened to my adolescent problems without judgment.

  A dog couldn't betray you, couldn't lie to you. A dog's loyalty was simpler, purer than any human connection. A dog’s agenda was to follow the alpha, to take care of the pack. A dog could sniff out food, help me find much needed sustenance amidst these desolate ruins, warn me if something monstrous was coming ahead of time with a growl.

  "A dog," I said aloud. "Just like my grandfather's husky. One that can help me survive out here. One I can trust. Nessy! Bring her back if you can, just like you brought me back!”

  The Companion symbol pulsed once, brightly, then reformed into the silhouette of a canine head. For a moment, I felt a flicker of relief—something familiar in this utterly alien landscape. I held my breath, hoping to get back someone that I loved and lost.

  Then the symbol exploded in a shower of silver particles that rained down on the crystalline remains of the conceptoid.

  The ossified, crystalline body cracked like an egg, splitting open with a blinding flash that made me stagger backwards.

  When I blinked, clearing my throbbing vision, something… else was there, filling the blue coveralls.

  Not a dog, but a girl—no, not quite a girl either. She rose from the shattered shell of the creature I had killed, shaking off sparkling, fading eggshell-like remnants like a dog shaking off water after a swim.

  She was humanoid… but clearly not entirely human.

  White and black fur covered her entire body in patterns reminiscent of a husky's markings. Her face was an unsettling blend of human and canine features—dark nose, a shortened muzzle, pointed, fluffy, dark ears that swiveled atop her head, long locks of hair that started black at the top and turned white when they reached her shoulders.

  I stared at her, speechless.

  This wasn't what I had asked for. This wasn't what I had wanted at all!

  [Companion procured based on user desire and available conceptoid strata. Companion designation: Nessy.] The System notified me.

  "Hey! This isn't what I meant," I said, voice tight with frustration. "I wanted a dog! An actual dog. Not whatever this fu..."

  The dog-girl—Nessy, apparently—tilted her head in a gesture so canine it was jarring on her humanoid frame. She stared at me with wide, brilliant, blue eyes.

  Then she lunged at me with startling speed, knocking me backward onto the broken pavement before I could react. My head cracked against the rubble, pain blooming bright and sharp at the base of my skull and all over me as the conceptoid stop-sign-made injuries throbbed madly.

  "Alec! ALEC!" she yelped, her voice a disconcerting mix of human speech and canine excitement. Her weight pinned me down as she frantically licked at my face, wide tongue slathering saliva against my skin. "You're back! You're back! I found you!"

  Her white paws—hands?—scrabbled at my shoulders, claws catching on the fabric of the borrowed orange coveralls. The proximity of her inhuman face to mine sent panic surging through me. I pushed against her chest, struggling to create distance between us.

  "Ow, owww, shit, damn it, get off me!" I shouted, dropping the stop sign and finally managing to shove her aside. I scrambled, backing away with my hands raised defensively. "Stay back!"

  Nessy froze, her pointed ears flattening against her skull. Those piercing blue eyes—so familiar yet alien in her face—widened with hurt and confusion. She rapidly retreated away from me, hunched over, her posture suddenly submissive.

  "Why are you mad at me?" she whimpered. "Don't you recognize me? Oh, you’re hurt.” She noticed my bruises and scratches. “Sorry… I got too excited. I’ve been looking for you for so long and…”

  I wiped her saliva from my face with the back of my hand, trying to steady my breathing.

  "You're not... this isn't what I asked for!" I growled, slowly rising. "I wanted an actual dog! A normal husky. Not... whatever the hell you are!”

  Her head tilted in confusion, a gesture so fundamentally canine that for a moment, I could almost see the idea of the companion I'd intended to create, the memory of my best friend from my childhood.

  "But I am a dog," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She gestured to herself with a fur-covered white hand that ended in black claws. "See? Dog!”

  "No, you're not, damn it!" I growled. "Dogs don't talk. And they certainly don't stand on two legs or have... Fuzzy hands with pink paw pads. Ugh."

  “Since when do you not like my paw pads…” she began and then something horrid howled in the foggy street sounding like a fax fused to a thousand pigeons. Something moved across the rubble with the sound of tapping feet. Too many feet for my liking.

  Both of us froze, looked at each other and then rapidly retreated into the nearest coffee shop, ducking behind a cracked wall.

  The tapping of legs sounded closer. I peered through a crack in the wall.

  Something vast and lanky shambled through the fog, its form only partially visible.

  It looked like someone had grafted a municipal playground onto the body of a monstrous, hollow insect. A central dome—what I recognized as a children's playground carousel—rotated slowly at the creature's center, its peeling, green and orange paint visible. From this central hub extended dozens of jointed legs that appeared to be made from playground slides, each segment connected by bulbous joints. The legs clicked against the pavement in an irregular rhythm that set my teeth on edge.

  Where a head should be, a twisted jungle gym formed a cage-like structure housing what looked like hundreds of swinging tire swings that pulsed like organs. Each "tire" contained a glowing amber substance that cast sickly light through the fog. The entire abomination moved with an unnatural grace, pivoting on its many legs as it seemed to search for something to snack on.

  Nessy’s clawed hand dug into mine as both of us tried not to breathe.

  We remained frozen as the creature pivoted slowly, its carousel body rotating with a faint, discordant melody that sounded like a corrupted music box. After what felt like an eternity, it resumed its clicking progress down the street, disappearing back into the fog.

  "We should go," I whispered when the sounds had faded. "Before it comes back."

  “Go where?” Nessy asked, her canine ears swiveling left and right. "I don’t think that anywhere is particularly safe now. The System keeps creating new horrors by fusing things to things."

  I gave her a look.

  “What?” She asked.

  “You’re a thing the System created,” I pointed out.

  “What?! No I am not!” She insisted.

  “You’re a dog-human,” I said.

  "I'm a dog!" Nessy insisted, her fluffy black and white tail twitching with agitation. "I've always been a dog! I’m not like that… living playground thing. We went to high school together Alec! We had English class together at Ferguson High!"

  The name of the school hit me like another physical blow.

  Ferguson High—where I'd gone as a teenager.

  "Ferguson High didn't have any... dog-people,” I whisper-hissed. “There is no such thing as dog people. You’re the first dog-person I’ve met!”

  "Yeah, sure. Next you'll tell me President Roosevelt didn't have his famous Scottish Terrier advisor during the New Deal," she rolled her eyes.

  "Roosevelt had a dog named Fala, but it was just a pet. It didn't advise him on policy." I pointed out.

  Nessy's dark tail with a white tip swished behind her, cutting through the air with indignation. "What are you talking about? Fala was Secretary of the Treasury! There's that famous photograph of him wearing those tiny glasses while reviewing economic policy." She growled. "Everyone knows that!"

  I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to make sense of her words. The world had already transformed beyond recognition—buildings reclaimed by unnatural vegetation, streets buckled and broken, strange conceptoid creatures that offered rewards upon death—but somehow this conversation felt like the most surreal aspect of my resurrection.

  "Let me get this straight," I said, lowering my hands. "You think... that you knew me in high school? That we took English together?"

  "Of course!" Nessy's ears perked up, her mood shifting with canine quickness. "You sat two rows behind me. You always smelled like those peanut butter sandwiches your mom made that you pawned off to me." Her nose twitched at the memory. "And you were terrible at literature. I helped you study for midterms junior year!”

  The details were oddly specific, yet completely wrong. I had indeed been terrible at literature, and my mother had packed those awful peanut butter sandwiches I hated, but there had been no dog-girl Nessy at Ferguson High.

  I found myself staring at the white angel-wing markings that swept across her forehead—identical to the ones on my grandfather's husky forehead fur pattern. My chest tightened with a sudden, visceral memory: seeing these wings visible through murky quarry water as teeth closed around my clothes, dragging my unresponsive body toward the surface, toward life.

  My guardian angel.

  Nessy fidgeted under my scrutiny, her too-human hands nervously smoothing the matted fur of her arms. There was something undeniably beautiful about her—the crystalline blue of her eyes, the dark nose, the canid-human face, her fit, curvy body wrapped in fur that transitioned from midnight black to pristine white. She was beautiful in the way a porcelain doll is beautiful—flawless, idealized, and also… utterly wrong, surreal, impossible just like the playground-centipede.

  "What do you remember about the quarry," I said suddenly, unable to stop myself. "About what happened there when I was thirteen?"

  Nessy's expression softened. She rocked on her clawed feet. "You fell in," she said simply. "You were showing off, walking along that concrete ledge where everyone went cliff-diving in the summer. You slipped and hit your head on the way down." Her eyes momentarily clouded with the memory. "I jumped in after you. Pulled you all the way to the beach a few hundred feet away. Almost freaking drowned myself since you kept clinging to me so hard."

  A chill ran down my spine. The events matched exactly what had happened, but with one crucial difference—it had been an ordinary dog, who dragged me from the water while the rest of my ‘friends’ did fuck all to help me.

  "And then what?" I pressed. "After you pulled me out?"

  "Your grandfather drove us to the hospital," she continued, the words spilling out with pure conviction. "Doc Flanaghan—you remember him, that old, balding bloodhound?—he gave you three stitches in your forehead." She reached out as if to touch my hairline where the scar had been. I flinched away instinctively.

  "Doc Flanaghan was human," I said.

  Nessy blinked rapidly, her head tilting first one way then the other. "Are you feeling okay, Alec? Hrmmm." She sniffed the air, nostrils flaring. "You smell… like you. You’re hurt though. You must have hit your head and now you’re confused. Are you concussed?"

  "I'm not the one who's confused," I snapped, frustration boiling over. “You're confused! Stop confusing me with this dog-world nonsense! This bloody place is confusing enough!”

  Nessy regarded me with concern that made her look disconcertingly like a kindergarten teacher dealing with a difficult child. "Alec," she said slowly, "dogs and humans have always lived side by side. Worked together. Gone to school together. For thousands of years, since humans began to adopt wild wolves!"

  "No," I insisted, "they haven't."

  "Oh really?" She crossed her arms, her fur bristling slightly. "Then who was the first dog astronaut to walk on the moon alongside Neil Armstrong? Everyone knows it was Kira Pawstrong! There's that famous quote: 'One small step for man, one giant leap for canine-kind.'"

  I stared at her. In her eyes, I could see absolute certainty—these weren't lies she was telling, but memories she genuinely believed. Memories of a world that had never existed, couldn't exist.

  "Next you're going to tell me that Shakespeare was a dog?" I chortled.

  "William Shakespeare?" Nessy's tail wagged slightly. "Nah. He was a human. Mrs. Abernathy had us read 'Romeo and Juliet' junior year. 'Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene...'" She recited the opening lines perfectly. "Classic tale of love between a human boy and a collie girl from feuding families."

  I couldn't help it—a slightly hysterical laugh escaped me. "Romeo and Juliet were both human!"

  "No, no, no," Nessy insisted, wagging a clawed finger at me. "You're thinking of 'Hamlet,' which was all humans. 'Romeo and Juliet' was specifically about the tensions between human and canine communities in medieval Italy. It's Shakespeare's most famous exploration of species-based prejudice!” She declared and then looked past me, sniffing the air.

  “Right… I'm so done with this conversation,” I sighed.

  “Are you…okay?” She asked.

  "As okay as I can be after dying horribly and fermenting in a bathtub for weeks," I let out, the words falling between us like stones.

  Nessy's ears flattened, folding down to her mane, her blue eyes widening with horror. "You… What?!"

  "I was murdered. Drowned in a bathtub by cartel gangsters looking for my brother." I revealed. "I died, and this... System came."

  The dog-girl stared at me with a shocked expression.

  "The System reconstituted me," I continued. “Rebuilt me. Molecule by molecule. Like the Ship of Theseus."

  Nessy studied me, her head tilting in that distinctly canine way. Her nostrils flared as she processed my scent, seemingly searching for truth. Seconds stretched into a full minute of silence.

  "We didn't go to high school together. You're not real—not in the way you think you are,” I said. “You're… just something the System created when I killed a conceptoid thing five minutes ago."

  "No, no, no," she shook her head. "I was the one who killed the conceptoid and made a wish on it to find you! Alec, it's me. It's Nessy. Your best friend!"

  "My grandfather had a dog named Nessy," I stubbornly insisted, even though we were clearly at an impasse and starting to go in circles. "A regular… husky!”

  “I keep telling you, I’m a perfectly normal husky, Alec!” She showed me her fur-covered hands as if that proved anything.

  “If the System didn’t make you, where did you come from?” I demanded.

  "What do you mean, 'where did I come from'? I've been searching for you for over a week!" Her voice cracked.

  I stared at her, contemplating the depths with which the System could blip a dog-person concept into existence by twisting my wish for a companion.

  "I went to sleep in my apartment two weeks ago… thinking about you finally coming back home to Fergus this summer," she said. Then, these silver words appeared floating in my eyes, waking me up. ‘System integration commencing. Prepare for reality recalibration.’ At first, I thought I was dreaming."

  I pursed my lips. Great. She had a backstory and everything.

  "Then these… changes started when morning came. Slowly at first—dead things stopped decaying correctly. Then with each passing day… more and more freaky weirdness seeped through the cracks, messed up reality. Gradually, the world became a little less familiar." Her ears flattened at the memory. "But the worst of it wasn't from the System—it was from people. People who... became freakishly strong or fast or fused with other... things. Then mass panic started, riots, fires, anarchy. Everyone turned on each other while the dead refused to stay dead and broken things fixed themselves in impossible ways, blooming like alien mushrooms and flowers.”

  She exhaled.

  “Then the net and phone lines went down and I had no way of contacting you,” She shivered visibly. "So I left Fergus, heading south. I drove until the road became impassable and then I ran for days… almost a week, I think. Sleeping in abandoned buildings, scavenging for food, dodging gangs of looters and undead, freakish… things. The whole time, I kept thinking about that Avicii animated music video we watched together—you know, the one with the dog running through gunfire and explosions, desperately searching for her best friend after he was conscripted to go to war? That's how I felt. Like everything was falling apart around me, but I had to keep moving, ‘cus no matter what… had to find you!”

  >Avichii video

  Fun stuff about the art for this series:

  VERY specialized, smaller, personal tool, made entirely from .

  a diffusion process like this [a custom image generative network that's trained from scratch using my own data]. This model utilizes madelbulb renders + 10 terabytes of photography I shot over past 20 years in my urbex trips across Canada, USA, Europe and Siberia + 800 gigabytes of 3d models designed or 3d scanned myself + . It is the only one of its kind since it's 100% made by me.

  Example of art process [from my studio assistant Mabi]: